George Bush, meet John Major

Ewen MacAskill has a very good article in Guardian Comment this morning in which he compares the demise of the Bush administration with the demise of the Major administration in the UK.

Major had made a speech that would prove to be his government's undoing. He had claimed that his government was going to go "back to basics", which the press chose to see as a moral clarion call. Against that moral clarion call it was easy to highlight every sexual scandal and the "cash for questions" affair as a legitimate line of newspaper inquiry in order to show the level of hypocrisy between Major's moral stance and the seedy government that he actually led.

To be fair, Major probably didn't mean what the press chose to construe from his "back to basics" speech, but it nevertheless became the standard against which his government's behaviour was measured. Bush, however, went considerably further than Major; promising to "restore honor and dignity to the White House."

I'm sure Bush was simply having a dig at Clinton and promising that he wouldn't be caught with his trousers down in the Oval Office, but it was, nevertheless, a large claim and one that he was asking that his government be measured against.

Like Major, the Bush administration are finding it very hard to live up to the standards that they have set themselves.

There is a strong parallel between that period and what is happening to the Republican party in America now. The party of family values, the one allied to the Christian right, the one unwilling to countenance gay marriage, is now facing scandal after scandal, financial as well as sexual. Last year it was Mark Foley and Jack Abramoff. This year a growing list that includes senators David Vitter and now Larry Craig. And, like their British counterparts, American journalists, especially television one, are revelling in it.

George Bush and the Republican party, like Major and the Conservatives, are only vulnerable to these scandals because of more fundamental weaknesses. Major lost public confidence after the Black Wednesday economic disaster and the party in-fighting over Europe. Bush has lost it over Iraq and Hurricane Katrina.

With Major, the scandals became an avalanche; and by the time his government faced the electorate, his "back to basics" claim had rendered his government a laughing stock and had given Labour an unassailable lead in the polls.

Bush appears to be floundering on very similar ground to that on which Major came adrift. Like Major, Bush has claimed to represent Christian family values, and it is against those values that he has asked for his government to be measured. Indeed, by calling for a ban of "gay marriages" Bush has played the homophobic card in a much stronger way than Major would ever have dared to play it in the UK.

Because of Bush's stance vis a vis gay marriage, he has given a nod to the more extreme elements of his party that, whilst the party insists that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality and that it is only on the subject of marriage that Republicans oppose the gay lifestyle, there is nevertheless an undertone which suggests that this is a lifestyle that the party - for religious and moral reasons - disapproves of.

Indeed, the Idaho Family Values Association have gone as far as to call for a purge:

The Party, in the wake of the Mark Foley incident in particular, can no longer straddle the fence on the issue of homosexual behavior. Even setting Senator Craig's situation aside, the Party should regard participation in the self-destructive homosexual lifestyle as incompatible with public service on behalf of the GOP.

The Idaho Family Values Association are only calling for the administration to publicly state what it has hitherto only hinted at. That it strongly disapproves of homosexuality.

Now I'm actually quite sure that most members of the Bush administration couldn't give two hoots about a person's sexual orientation. However, by aligning themselves with the more extreme elements of the Christian right, they have made every sexual peccadillo - especially gay ones - dynamite under their own house.

It reminds me of the words of John F Kennedy in his inaugural address: "those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside."

The sexual scandals currently rocking the Bush administration are, like the scandals that shook Major's government, especially powerful because of the stances that both administration's took.

When Major's government collapsed, the Tory party collapsed with it, and they have never really recovered. Bush's administration is showing similar fault lines. If the Democratic party had any real balls they would hold firm to their own beliefs, refuse to cow to any Republican standard of morality or patriotism, and push the whole seedy house down. For, like the Major government, Bush's moral stance is a lie. One needs only to hold a mirror up to it, to destroy it.

Each and every subsequent scandal will reveal the chasm between the Christian values Bush claims to espouse and the government which he actually leads. And, therein, lies the potential for the Republican downfall.

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